Dave Freedman - Natural Selection

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but you and I went over this ray’s description in great detail, and you said you didn’t recognize it. Is that still the case?” Ackerman held up his yellow pad. “Because I have my notes right here if you want to go over them.”

“That’s OK.”

Jason didn’t need notes. He remembered the ray’s description well, if only because it wasn’t familiar: stealth-shaped and very thick, black on one side and white on the other, with large black eyes, a huge mouth, and horns on the mouth’s sides. And aggressive behavior. Apparently, the ray had snapped at someone.

Jason doubted it was a new species, and yet if the description was accurate, he didn’t know what known species it belonged to. Ackerman had correctly nixed several candidates, and Jason later eliminated half a dozen more, the Raja binoculata and the Torpedo californica among others. There were additional possibilities, but they were all remote.

“You think it could have just been a newborn manta, Jason?” Craig Summers asked.

“Near Clarita? Highly unlikely.”

Jason turned to the water. But it was strange, wasn’t it? Because what had been described—the horned head, the wide mouth, the black top and white bottom—were all classic signs of the manta ray. But not only were mantas much thinner, they were also tropical and lived in warm locales near the equator. Sure, they migrated to cooler waters in the summer, and a wayward manta from Mexico could easily have strayed into Southern California waters. But only if it had been an adult. A newborn never would have strayed that far. Unless—he turned to Darryl and Monique.

“Any way a pregnant adult would have migrated up from Mexico?”

Darryl readjusted his polo’s collar. “To spawn in Clarita?”

“Yeah.”

“By itself?”

Jason shrugged. “I guess so.”

“Highly unlikely.”

Jason nodded. “Monique?”

“A pregnant animal migrating that far from familiar waters to spawn? No way.”

“What about a group of pregnant mantas, then? Could they have migrated up together?”

Monique raised an eyebrow. “It’s technically possible, but I doubt it.”

So did Jason. While mantas regularly spawned in groups, he’d never heard of them doing so in strange locales. He pulled his dark hair back with one hand. What had that woman seen off Clarita Island? He looked out over the water again. If the physical description was accurate, perhaps it was a new species. But so what? What the hell did a new species have to do with his manta rays?

Ackerman stared at him coldly. “So could it have been a new species?”

“Possibly.”

“Does possibly mean likely?”

A glimmer of anger flashed in Jason’s eyes. He had work to do here. They still had to find a group of mantas capable of surviving in the aquarium—find them, transport them to San Diego, get the aquarium prepared, then perform countless other tasks that could easily take five months. He didn’t have time for this.

“Jason, does possibly mean likely?”

“ Possibly means possibly.”

“Well, that’s enough for me. I think you should go to Clarita and find out for sure if it’s new or not.”

“What? Why?”

“Because we need to do something, we need to make some kind of progress here.”

“We are making progress, Harry.”

“Not the way I define it.”

“How do you define it?”

The eyes turned colder. “In dollars and cents. I’ve lost millions on this, do you understand that? This entire project was a disaster from the get-go.”

“Harry, we can still fill that aquarium with manta rays. I promise we can do it.”

“No, we can’t.”

“I’m telling you, I really think we—”

“I’ve been patient; you know I’ve been very patient.”

“And we appreciate that, but if you’d just let us—”

“Jason, Manta World is over.” This was said matter-of-factly and without emotion. “I’m not capable of financing it any further and… that’s it. You know this isn’t what I wanted.”

Jason didn’t move. Under the beating sun, he suddenly felt light-headed in his wet suit, like he’d fall off the boat. He became aware of his feet on the teak and steadied himself on a guardrail.

“I see,” he managed to say. He couldn’t believe it. He was numb.

Lisa sighed inwardly. She felt bad for Jason, though she wasn’t entirely sympathetic. It would always be painful for a guy with his driven personality to adapt to change. Not only was it impossible for him to trust anyone to do his or her job, he also couldn’t see when something just wasn’t working. He didn’t have an off switch. But even Jason couldn’t ignore this. The plug had just been pulled, and it was time for the man who had once been called “the next Jacques Cousteau” to finally move on.

Lisa shook her head. The next Jacques Cousteau. She’d first heard the nickname before she even met Jason, six years before, when Ichthyology Journal had run a cover story on him in an entire issue dedicated to mantas. In an article filled with glossy pictures, the magazine had chronicled everything, from his typical boyish obsession with the great fish, to his PhD in ichthyology at UCSD, to his then ranking as the number one manta ray expert in the world. The whole thing generated an incredible amount of hype and put Jason’s professional expectations through the roof. Then Ackerman had come calling.

The original idea for the aquarium had actually been Ackerman’s. A lawyer who suddenly had obscene piles of money after his IPO, Ackerman hired a consulting firm that determined that a new manta aquarium in San Diego could triple another famous water park’s already booming attendance. The primary reason for such a prediction: nothing like it existed anywhere in the world. While existing marine facilities had exhibits featuring smaller ray species, none was anywhere near the spectacle that a warehouse-size aquarium filled with creatures as big as planes promised to be. Kids loved mantas, absolutely loved them, and across the globe, their parents said they’d pay handsomely for the privilege of seeing them. The consultants determined that if the “right aquarium” were constructed, it could become an attraction on a global scale. Big enough to give Ackerman the respect he so craved. And big enough to put him in the billionaires’ club.

A manta aquarium had made sense for its research potential too. Ichthyologists, and all animal researchers, tried to analyze their subject in their natural habitats whenever possible, but the reality was that studying large, wild creatures swimming freely in the open ocean was extremely difficult. By comparison, in captivity, animals could be studied extensively and around the clock. Indeed, most of what was known about dolphins—the most analyzed ocean-dwelling species on earth—had been learned from studying specimens in captivity. That had been the aquarium’s precise research objective: to allow Jason Aldridge and others to analyze manta rays as thoroughly as dolphins had been.

Construction of the aquarium, which Jason himself had designed, had been completed in two years. Financial pro formas predicted the $95 million cost would be paid off in eighteen months. On every front, hopes had been sky-high for the aquarium’s opening. It never happened. The opening was delayed, rescheduled four times, then scrapped entirely. For more than three years, it had been one disaster after another. And through everything, including his own fall from grace, Jason had been nothing but optimistic, a fighter with a fantastic attitude who never gave up.

The biggest problem had been the mantas themselves. For reasons unknown, they simply wouldn’t stay alive. Forty-seven died throughout a thirty-two-month period, and neither Jason nor any of the experts hired to support him could determine why. Anything and everything was done to save them. Nothing worked.